chinese studies are going well, even if, naturally, no one knows whether the exam will actually take place next july. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ still, this is no excuse to slack on the learning, which at the moment means mostly learning new characters and making sure i don’t forget the old ones.

to do this, i’m revising whatever skritter throws at me everyday, using beeminder to make sure i study characters at least 2 hours/week… but it’s often not enough. to reach fluency in the 1200 characters needed to take the hsk4, one has to practice reading them fast and in context — not just in flashcards.

books like graded readers help, for sure… but progress is slow, and honestly, it’s hard to focus when there’a wall of characters in every page, staring at you.

meanwhile, sometime ago i found out about escape, which is a text-based adventure. remember those? you move a character around with text commands, receive a description of what the character is seeing at every step, and try to interact with the world in order to achieve a certain goal. the twist here is that it’s done in chinese, for people learning the language!

i find it a really clever and unexpected use of these text-adventures, as a story is slowly built in your target language, sentence by sentence. and there’s also an integrated dictionary, just in case.

i’ve died a number of times already on my quest to escape, but it’s been lots of fun. :)